Media

Republican skepticism toward coronavirus vaccines and American democracy is increasingly being driven by Fox News' right-wing competitors.

One America News Network and Newsmax remain far behind Fox News in TV ratings, but the two upstarts are becoming the primary news source for an increasingly extremist slice of the Republican electorate, reported FiveThirtyEight.

News broke on Wednesday that Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried working through "Russian intermediaries" shortly before he started making explosive claims about being "spied" on by the United States government.

Julia Davis, who conducts analysis of Russian state media for The Daily Beast, noticed on Twitter last month that Carlson was receiving fawning adulation from the Russian press, which praised him for echoing Kremlin talking points about the Capitol riots and also for attacking America's intelligence services.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson's claims that the American government illegally spied on him reportedly came shortly after he reached out to "Kremlin intermediaries" living in the United States to help him score an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that Carlson's attempts to interview Putin came under US officials' radar, although it's not clear how they found out about it.

Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday became one of the first Fox News hosts to cover NSA spying allegations made by Tucker Carlson, one of the network's biggest stars.

Carlson joined Bartiromo on her Mornings with Maria Fox Business program.

COVID-19 has killed over 600,000 Americans, and a disproportionate number of the victims have been elderly. But Fox News' Tucker Carlson doesn't appear to have a great deal of empathy for them.

"In a report from July of last year, the CDC analyzed all deaths," said Carlson in his Tuesday night broadcast. "They found the median age death from COVID was 78. At that point, for all months of 2020, life expectancy in the U.S. was younger than that. It was 77. You think they hyped COVID a little bit? Yeah, they did. If the median age of people dying is older than life expectancy? Yep, they hyped it."

Fox News' campaign against critical race theory shows no signs of abetting, as the network mentioned it more than 100 different times in less than a day on Tuesday.

According to The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, Fox on Tuesday mentioned critical race theory a whopping 123 times on Tuesday as of 2 p.m. ET.

Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed on Tuesday that "all" of America's Founding Fathers were "against slavery" even though more than half of them owned slaves.

McEnany made the assertion while complaining that Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) slammed the July 4 holiday as a celebration for white people.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Fox News is moving ahead with plans to produce its own dedicated weather channel.

"Later this year, Rupert Murdoch is set to debut Fox Weather, a 24-hour streaming channel that promises to do for 7-day forecasts what Fox has done for American politics, financial news and sports," reported Michael Grynbaum. "Amid a waning appetite for political news in the post-Trump era, media executives are realizing that demand for weather updates is ubiquitous — and for an increasing swath of the country, a matter of urgent concern. In the past week alone, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records, wildfires burned in Colorado, and Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean."

In an attempt to hype up Donald Trump's rally in Sarasota, Florida rally on Saturday night that was ignored by the cable network, the new spokesperson for the ex-president directed his fans to a report that specifically called out his lies about the 2020 election.

Sunday morning, spokesperson Liz Harrington tweeted a link to an Al.com story about the rally with Harrington quoting the article stating, "Saturday's Save America Rally in Sarasota attracted a record crowd to the Sarasota Fairgrounds."

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) warned Republicans who refuse to get vaccinated that they are playing "the death lottery."

During an interview on ABC's This Week program, host Martha Raddatz noted that people in states with Republican majorities are less likely to get vaccinated.

According to a report from the Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, the great majority of cable news shows have taken a hit in the ratings now that Donald Trump is not providing daily fodder for their hosts, and Fox News is going out of the way to point out the viewership decline of their liberal competitors in an effort to hide their own plummeting numbers.

While it has previously been reported that Fox saw a drop in viewers after Trump railed at the conservative network for being the first to report that he lost Arizona in the 2020 election -- a vote total the ex-president is still contesting over six months after the election -- the Beast notes things have gone from bad to worse for Fox.

A CNN doctor is fed up with Fox News' Tucker Carlson's seemingly reckless coverage where the COVID-19 vaccine is concerned. Now, he's pushing back against the conservative news anchor.

On Friday, July 2, CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner took to Twitter with an assessment of Carlson's coverage as he posed a question to him, reports HuffPost. He tweeted, "Carlson seems hellbent on letting COVID go on as long as possible. He's "questioned" the safety of vaccines. Now he says masks are unsafe. Somehow he never seems to have an actual expert on his show to discuss."

Because the right-wing media are so competitive, countless pundits are resorting to increasingly over-the-top rhetoric in the hope of juicing their ratings or traffic. The conservative pundits of the 1970s and 1980s — most famously, George Will and the late National Review founder William F. Buckley — were downright tranquil compared to the far-right extremism one finds on Newsmax TV or One America News on a daily basis. And journalist Adam Gabbatt, in an article published by The Guardian this week, reports that critics of this inflammatory rhetoric fear it will lead to violence at a time when political tensions are extremely high in the United States.

According to Gabbatt, "The extremist rhetoric from right-wing news networks and some elected Republicans is 'intensifying,' experts have warned, after a Republican congressman compared Democrats to Nazis and a hard-right news host suggested tens of thousands of Americans should be executed. Right-wing TV personalities, including Fox News' Tucker Carlson, and Republican politicians have seized every opportunity to rail against Democrats and liberals in recent months, with race increasingly coming to the fore."